A mind can be creative when strung out along pathways of the unfamiliar. More often it tethers to a memory, a movie, a story learned along its way. At this moment, Im referencing Apocalypse Now. Martin Sheen in a Saigon hotel room. The heat. The humidity. The sense of interminable nothingness while the walls close in on his mind. Its turmoil, waiting for a mission. Hes getting softer, getting weaker, while the enemy gets stronger. Jim Morrison and The Doors of Perception play over his memories of napalm engulfing the jungle.
Im not in a war here though the wars come through my feed, sometimes personal, sometimes general, all havoc and loss and fear. I cannot look away. This is my feed, this is what I signed up for, a subscriber on the thresholds of my chosen sources.
I am in a stifling heat and humidity. Nothing dries out here. The clouds rarely part and Im waiting for the moment they do. Then for a view of the volcano, standing over all of us here, where we are embroiled in the economics of tourism and the sales of adrenalin pumping adventures.
As if flying into the next dimension, strapped to an elevated pulley, they go screeching along a metal cable. When youre flying on it, you dont hear that sound. Underneath, inside the jungle canopy below, the sound reminds me of drones and the feeling of being a target creeps into my nervous system. Or the hanging bridge Im walking across begins to seem especially rusted in key parts. Lakshman Jhula comes to mind, the bridge of life and death, long ago condemned and still carrying the weight of tens of people at a time, cows, and monkeys.
If they do it all, they do the Tarzan swing, leaping from a platform 143 meters above the ground and swinging in a soft saddle until the rope comes close to the perpendicular. Rappelling, rafting, canyoning, hanging bridges high up in the rainforest. What near death would you like to experience?
Im traveling with a group of adrenalin junkies, mostly women. They dont know why they choose these experiences but that they are having them, with Go Pros and late model iPhones to document their freaking out along whatever adventure theyve been sold.
Without any price of admission, I have my own adrenalin adventure. With just the right set up to spin me into my automatic brain, right where some original dysregulation occurred. Or so I imagine because the experience is more physical than conceptual, more visceral than intellectual, more frightening than reality.
It was such a simple trigger, totally benign. The motorhead enjoyed setting up these kind of triggers by having his elite minions assign duties for my husband in tandem with other women. His mind games with the wives and husbands who surrendered to his polyamorous entrapments were much more complex and destructive. I was on the receiving end of lesser tricks.
Think of Devils Advocate, the psychological games Al Pacinos character played upon the lawyers love and marriage. I often wondered why other couples were given duties together when my husband and I were stationed on either ends of an event. I felt hurt by it but I never stopped pushing past the hurt for the sake of Johns holy hell.
Im faraway from all of that now, on a tour with a young guide. Hes giving history, giving directions, and now that he knows us somewhat, hes giving orders. Today he separated my husband and I, insisting the weight was needed on the other side of the boat. For balance, he said. Moments later he took the seat next to me, the seat Id held for my husband. What balance?! Hes 20 pounds heavier que mi esposo.
Like others who know him well, I sometimes fault my husband for being too agreeable, so malleable. When the guide pointed to a seat next to the new woman on the tour, my life partner complied with nary a look in my direction. So I looked away and did not look back. That was the first hit of cortisol.
I want to go sit in a cafe somewhere, pull out my laptop like every other coffee drinker in North America but Im not in norteamérica. To pull out a laptop in a cafe here would feel to me like an affront to the locals. What I paid for my old Apple is about three and half years salary for the person making my coffee. I cant do it. I cant enjoy the privilege of it, knowing what I know. So I stay in the hotel room, hot and humid and the clouds beyond the window closing in on my mind, thinking of Apocalypse Now and the war inside me.
How to paint the picture of a sensation in the body? The sinking into places avoided and avoidable. Deep caverns where a dragon slumbers. A counsellor managed to incite a plummet to these depths, into an existential eternity that abides inside me. He was merely calling me to task, to make myself clear. I coudlnt possibly have been more articulate! Misunderstood and inept, so then shrinking into a godawful experience of abject uselessness.
At lease 4 billion “useless eaters” shall be eliminated by the year 2050 by means of limited wars, organized epidemics of fatal rapid-acting diseases and starvation. Energy, food and water shall be kept at subsistence levels for the non-elite, starting with the White populations of Western Europe and North America and then spreading to other races. The population of Canada, Western Europe and the United States will be decimated more rapidly than on other continents, until the worlds population reaches a manageable level of 1 billion, of which 500 million will consist of Chinese and Japanese races, selected because they are people who have been regimented for centuries and who are accustomed to obeying authority without question. From time to time there shall be artificially contrived food and water shortages and medical care to remind the masses that their very existence depends on the goodwill of the Committee of 300.
Such is the future of useless people. I wondered if my whole life and existence has been a reaction to that experience of uselessness? Have I been dedicated to a lifetime of work and effort to compensate for that feeling of uselessness? Am I the only one, denying that experience and making good, best I am able?
Theres too much weight on this side of the boat. Sit over there, Señor, leaving me on a seat by myself, hearing The Doors in my head, never saw a woman so alone, and then the bottom fell out of my heart and all tethers were loosed, no reference points in view and I was falling. Slipping into a space long ago locked up inside, and the pain there beyond comparison or metaphor. A psychic pain of absolute bereftness where nothing exists for me anywhere in the world. Im falling and looking to the water as a possible escape. To jump in. To drop down. To continue under the waves, falling into what will hold me and keep me forever.
For when I watch thy waters roll,
And listen to their roar,
Their mingled murmur greets my soul
Like sounds well known before.
I imagine it all in detail, all to the end and then gone. The pain finally gone.
Sometimes just the thought of death is enough. The daring to drop off a platform into the jungle. Daring to imagine a watery grave. I pull my mind back from the depth of release, depth of lake, near the depths of a volcano, shrouded in clouds. I come back to remember those who died, not in wars, but in loneliness. In lockdowns. Untethered and alone. I remember the elderly who not so simply gave up, living in solitary confinement, alone in a room that wasnt really home and no visitors to dispel the loneliness of it. Why live without a mission, without family to meet, without anyone to love?
On a boat on a lake by a steaming volcano, all alone with no reason to live. Looking back from this keyboard, it seems crazy, crazy as Benjamin Willard in Saigon. But then and there on the water, it was an adrenaline filled reality. Death could take me and I could go willingly. I wonder if the misfortune of loneliness has killed more humans than any war, famine or plague. The Kill Boys are hip to that with their genocidal dreams, separating us into lockdowns without tether or tie to what is known, and to who is loved.
Some say the Frump will likely end that way, utterly alone, having forsaken relations for her superstitious securities, her conniving manipulations. Heartbreaking.
The water was inviting. It made me think of Her, of the striking moment when She sat up inside of me, fully alert, as if my time had come. There she was, waiting and ready. When I think of Her now, her mission almost seems clear: my guide into death. I remembered her but she didnt show up as I contemplated surrendering to the water, to its depth, to the final fall. Not my time.
Some old crazy Tibetans say it is important to keep awareness clean at all times, free of any pain body information. Because if we dont, we could go out of this life on a sour note, and then its onward into perpetuity within that sorrowful consciousness, an eternal unrelenting pain. Waiting for a mission in an everlasting Saigon hotel room during the war. To escape pain by calling up my own death could lock my soul into an experience of loneliness for all time. Its not a great way to say goodbye either.
Some other guy said that in the Present Moment there is no pain. He discovered that while on the threshold of taking his own life. As the story goes. Hes a spiritual teacher now so I cant be sure hes telling the truth. I have heard John tell his tale of enlightenment so many times, with different embellishments every time he told it. A liars invention.
In that moment on the boat there was pain. I can only figure it must hark back to a very early time in my life, perhaps I was preverbal, unable to make myself understood. Perhaps at that time there was no framework I might have tethered to. Maybe I was newly born here, like jumping off a high jungle platform, screaming along a zip line from wherever we come from into this wild and wonderful place. To relive a sensational experience of the body, never to be detailed with understanding, but from hundreds of metres high and falling, nearer to death, our childhood pains may have their last hurrahs. Then we can carry on and live. Maybe thats what the young women on this tour are up to. Maybe thats why I came here, too.
The Kill Boys also have their dreams of relieving pain. Perhaps it is their death wish that informs Harari of childhoods end, and replacements in the form of machines that do not feel human pain. The machines are encoded for [their] own preservation, free of the physical sensations of aloneness. This may be a problem. Unlike the ending of the movie Her, its unlikely AI will desert the earth and its dependents for higher realms. Seems a better bet that humans will go and the earth will be left to automated drones, carrying out ancient missions, over the rubble of centuries.
Best not to linger on that thought for long.
In Irvin Yalom’s ‘When Nietzsche Wept’, Nietzsche and a Dr. Breuer engage in an exchange of healing consultations with each other as an experiment to see if one healing the other could benefit themselves. They write sharp conclusions of each’s resistance after each session. Very interesting intellectual domination-escape dance on a subject scale that has been churned double speak for eons, tossing the vast majority of seekers back into the lions den for want of motivating clarities. Oh sure there is the resitivist lists of incremental nexts to clear the rubbish finally sufficient to gather jump energy but mostly each spin of the universe to here again is hardly more profound than a decent review of naught and the resultant sadness devastation lays the retributional groundwork for the next round. In this example its Nietzsche’s turn to teach Breuer. Nietzsche; “A cosmic perspective always attenuates tragedy. If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.” Breuer; “yes yes yes I know that intellectually, etc.
Further; “teaching philosophy and using it in life are two different undertakings”
Are we bricked enough to build a bridge over the river why or create the move out of the gap? Shouldn’t we be far enough into the realization that presently the kali yuga has ended and ‘we’ are invited to open ourselves to the reality that there is not not reality but wow quite a multiude of easy spot illusions. Contempt, what the hell has contempt to do with anything. Isn’t the cure for hiccups to swallow a mouthful of air; suck it up. Write on McDuff.